So, someone gives you an olive branch and you rip out the leaves and wipe your behind with them? Classy. I should have known to expect as much from you.

Well, that was the last time I will try to understand your comments, which most people will agree are neither cohesive nor coherent.

Please keep the avatar, it will make it easier for me to recognize when to browse down the page.

Some olive branch.

The first line was a sarcastic retort with a mention of one's family in it.

I don't care about sorry. Just admit that you posted something flat out wrong, were to lazy to verify it, and do so without coming up with some cockamamie face-saving excuse about how you were "just posting that to see what other people would say".

Owning up to something is an olive branch, not some throw away sentence that was preceded by an insult.

There is little ambiguity here if one actually looks at the historic facts instead of trying to reason based purely and only off of the text: the Second Amendment was never really about the right of individuals to bear arms, but rather, was always about the militias.

I asked Penn & Teller to respond to this. Here's what they had to say:

Thinking that "the people" means "the people"... what a nutjob.
Historical fact tells us that when the framers of the Constitution said "the people" they actually meant "the persons authorized by the government". Because we have to make sure that, after the government authorizes you to keep and bear arms, they can't take that right away... until they revoke your authorization, at which point you (naturally) lose that right.
And anyone who thinks otherwise is ignorant.

And anyone who thinks otherwise is actually reading historic sources instead of just deciding what he wants to believe and then forcing the facts to fit his ideology.

I'll say it again: that stupid video is shallow, ill-informed analysis for shallow, ill-informed people. Madoka is such a person, comm (which is he he's getting his legal analysis from a bloody stage magician), but you don't need to be. You don't have to revise history in order to justify your love of guns; you can have truth and your ideology, you need not compromise your integrity. But whatever, your choice.

In honor of this conversation I think it's time to bring back the ahistoric George Washington avatar.

[T]he largest gun control enforcers during the Reconstruction were the Ku Klux Klan, disarming black people with roving bands of "disarmament posses."

From the 2010 article by Adam Winkler entitled The Secret History of Guns:

Quote:

After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities. In January 1866, Harper’s Weekly reported that in Mississippi, such groups had “seized every gun and pistol found in the hands of the (so called) freedmen” in parts of the state. The most infamous of these disarmament posses, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan.

. . .

History has repeatedly shown that gun control has never been about controlling firearms, but rather to disarm marginalized people.

This history was recognized in McDonald v. Chicago, but the Court nonetheless chose to read the 2nd Amendment in a judicially conservative light.

Quote:

Liberals never ask themselves: who will get the maximum sentence for gun control violations? Who will get convicted more? Who will the police stop for guns?

Kevin Carson puts it best regarding liberal rhetoric and the reality of what they are endorsing:

Quote:

Regardless of the “liberal” or “progressive” rhetoric used to defend gun control, you can safely bet it will come down harder on the cottagers than on the gentry, harder on the workers than on the Pinkertons, and harder on the Black Panthers than on murdering cops.

Nevertheless, cartridge restrictions may yet be worthwhile if they actually prevent the occurrence of more Newtowns. The European demand to ban handguns, however, just sweeps aside the experience of U.S. history as irrelevant or barbarous.

There is little ambiguity here if one actually looks at the historic facts instead of trying to reason based purely and only off of the text: the Second Amendment was never really about the right of individuals to bear arms, but rather, was always about the militias.

I asked Penn & Teller to respond to this. Here's what they had to say:

So they are saying that the Second Amendmendment says that people can own guns to protect themselves against the militia? Whatever....

Let's see what one of the most respected scholars on originalism and the intepretation of Constitutional text has to say. Stanford historian Jack Rakove:

Quote:

The American colonies and states were not a libertarian utopia; their traditions of governance permitted legislatures and institutions of local government to act vigorously in the pursuit of public health and safety.

Quote:

In the eighteenth century, however, bills of rights were often regarded as statements of principle, meant to inform and shape the political behavior of both officials and citizens; but whether they established [Page 111] legally enforceable claims was far from certain.[22] Many clauses in the first eight amendments to the Constitution certainly aspired to have and eventually acquired that character, but the Second Amendment is arguably the one provision which partook most of the principle-enunciating attributes of the early state declarations of rights. Our quest to discover a perfect syntax and vocabulary for its twenty-seven words thus risks ascribing to a general statement of principle a measure of legal exactitude it was never conceived to carry.

Quote:

But the structure of the debates of the late 1780s did not conduce to pose the problem in the form that proponents of the individual right interpretation would prefer to exploit. As the records from the Constitutional Convention, the ensuing ratification campaign, and the debates in the First Congress of 1789 all demonstrate, the issue under discussion was always the militia, and that issue was posed primarily as a matter of defining the respective powers of two levels of government.

Quote:

Yet it is impossible to conceive how the Tenth Amendment could have excluded the traditional power of government to legislate broadly for public health and safety from the reserved powers of the states. It is precisely because this traditional [Page 164] function was (and remains) so essential to our concept of governance that the individual right interpretation has to insist that the principal purpose of the Second Amendment is to provide a powerful deterrent against tyranny. Only by evoking that speculative threat to the republic itself can the individual right interpretation identify a danger more ominous than the actual costs annually incurred through the casual and deliberate use of firearms.

There is little ambiguity here if one actually looks at the historic facts instead of trying to reason based purely and only off of the text: the Second Amendment was never really about the right of individuals to bear arms, but rather, was always about the militias.

I asked Penn & Teller to respond to this. Here's what they had to say:

So they are saying that the Second Amendmendment says that people can own guns to protect themselves against the militia? Whatever....

Let's see what one of the most respected scholars on originalism and the intepretation of Constitutional text has to say. Stanford historian Jack Rakove:

Quote:

The American colonies and states were not a libertarian utopia; their traditions of governance permitted legislatures and institutions of local government to act vigorously in the pursuit of public health and safety.

Quote:

In the eighteenth century, however, bills of rights were often regarded as statements of principle, meant to inform and shape the political behavior of both officials and citizens; but whether they established [Page 111] legally enforceable claims was far from certain.[22] Many clauses in the first eight amendments to the Constitution certainly aspired to have and eventually acquired that character, but the Second Amendment is arguably the one provision which partook most of the principle-enunciating attributes of the early state declarations of rights. Our quest to discover a perfect syntax and vocabulary for its twenty-seven words thus risks ascribing to a general statement of principle a measure of legal exactitude it was never conceived to carry.

Quote:

But the structure of the debates of the late 1780s did not conduce to pose the problem in the form that proponents of the individual right interpretation would prefer to exploit. As the records from the Constitutional Convention, the ensuing ratification campaign, and the debates in the First Congress of 1789 all demonstrate, the issue under discussion was always the militia, and that issue was posed primarily as a matter of defining the respective powers of two levels of government.

Quote:

Yet it is impossible to conceive how the Tenth Amendment could have excluded the traditional power of government to legislate broadly for public health and safety from the reserved powers of the states. It is precisely because this traditional [Page 164] function was (and remains) so essential to our concept of governance that the individual right interpretation has to insist that the principal purpose of the Second Amendment is to provide a powerful deterrent against tyranny. Only by evoking that speculative threat to the republic itself can the individual right interpretation identify a danger more ominous than the actual costs annually incurred through the casual and deliberate use of firearms.

Penn & Teller have made a textualist analysis of the 2nd Amendment. Textualism looks at the words of the Constitution themselves, whereas originalism interprets the text according to the understanding of the framers and also within the controversies surrounding the adoption of the Constitution. So, to the text:

Quote:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. - The Second Amendment

Penn's textualist analysis is incomplete. He totally ignores the clause between 'militia' and 'the right of the people' stating "being necessary to the security of a free state." This implies that militias exist to secure the nation. Therefore, we might read the militia as existing to thwart external threats. But then again, are not many of the threats to a free state internal?

[W]e should pause to focus on a few things that the Second Amendment does not say:

- It emphatically does not say that it protects the right of the militia to keep and bear arms.

- Nor does the Second Amendment say that the people's right to arms is sufficient to establish a well regulated militia, or that a well regulated militia is sufficient for the security of a free state.

- Nor does the Second Amendment say that the right of the people to keep and bears arms is protected only to the extent that such a right fosters a well regulated militia or the security of a free state.

As these observations suggest, the grammar of the Second Amendment emphasizes the indefiniteness of the relation between the introductory participial phrase and the main clause. If you parse the Amendment, it quickly becomes obvious that the first half of the sentence is an absolute phrase (or ablative absolute) that does not modify or limit any word in the main clause. The usual function of absolute phrases is to convey information about the circumstances surrounding the statement in the main clause, such as its cause. For example: "The teacher being ill, class was cancelled."

The importance of this can be illustrated with a simple example. Suppose the Constitution provided:

Quote:

A well educated Electorate, being necessary to self-governance in a free State, the right of the people to keep and read Books, shall not be infringed.

This provision, which is grammatically identical to the Second Amendment, obviously means the following: because a well educated electorate is necessary to the health of a free state, the right of the people to keep and read books shall not be infringed. The sentence does not say, imply, or even suggest that only registered voters have a right to books. Nor does the sentence say, imply, or even suggest that the right to books may be exercised only by state employees. Nor does the lack of identity between the electorate and the people create some kind of grammatical or linguistic tension within the sentence. It is perfectly reasonable for a constitution to give everyone a right to books as a means of fostering a well educated electorate. The goal might or might not be reached, and it could have been pursued by numerous other means. The creation of a general individual right, moreover, would certainly have other effects besides its impact on the electorate's educational level. And lots of legitimate questions could be raised about the scope of the right to books. But none of this offers the slightest reason to be mystified by the basic meaning of the sentence.

The Second Amendment is no different. Modern readers may have difficulty in seeing how a general right of individuals to keep and bear arms could contribute to a well regulated militia and to the security of a free state, and we shall explore that question in more detail below. But the text of the Second Amendment offers not the slightest warrant for presupposing that the answer to the question is that its framers were semi-literate fools who meant to say something like "The states shall have the right to maintain independent military forces for use against the federal government."

Now, a complete textualist analysis of the 2nd Amendment would have to include the other mentions of the militia in the Constitution.

The Constitutional Convention wrote:

Art. I Section. 8.

The Congress shall have Power[:]

. . .

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

Art. II Section 2

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

So, we can see from the text of the document that the militia could be called forth by U.S. Congress, was regulated by State and Federal law both, and the President directed the militia while under Federal command. So, how could the 2nd Amendment ever protect a right to rebellion against the center Federal power?

It couldn't. But at the same time, the 2nd Amendment prevents the Federal gov't (and after the 14th Amendment, neither the State gov'ts) from disarming the citizenry in its pursuit of regulating the militia.

Nelson Lund wrote:

[T]he original Constitution gave Congress almost unlimited authority to regulate the militia. As the operative clause of the Second Amendment makes clear, its purpose is simply to forbid one kind of inappropriate regulation (among the infinite possible regulations) that Congress might be tempted to enact under its sweeping authority to make all laws "necessary and proper" for executing the powers granted by the Constitution.21 What is that one kind of inappropriate regulation? Disarming the citizenry from among which any genuine militia must be constituted.

Congress is permitted to do many things to ruin the militia, and to omit many things that are necessary for a well regulated militia. Congress may pervert the militia into the functional equivalent of an army, or even deprive it completely of any meaningful existence. A lot of those things have in fact been done, and many members of the founding generation would have strongly disapproved. But the original Constitution allowed it, and the Second Amendment did not purport to interfere with congressional latitude to regulate the militia. What the Second Amendment does is to expressly forbid one particular, and particularly extravagant, extension of Congress' authority to make laws "necessary and proper" for exercising its control over the militia. Whatever the federal government does or fails to do about the militia, the Second Amendment forbids it from disarming citizens under the pretense of regulating the militia.

[T]he largest gun control enforcers during the Reconstruction were the Ku Klux Klan, disarming black people with roving bands of "disarmament posses."

When big city mayors talk about gun control they are working to achieve the exact same goal as the KKK. The school shootings etc are an effective cover in the attempt to repair the damage to the American NE cities caused by the Great Migration. It's just good PR. We want Jerome and his buddies in Harlem and the South Side of Chicago to stop ruining property values and driving whites out of cities but we can't say that so instead we say the problem is Billy Bob and his gun fetish in Alabama.